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A website about programming, technology, and life.

Blog

This is a collection of my longer form posts / articles. It’s a “blog” in the most traditional sense. You won’t find things here that are short-form, those will live under /micro when I eventually get around to building it out 😅

Day 3: Twitter Archive part 1

by Aaron Crowder on in Projects

A big part of owning my content is preserving it. I have over a decades worth of content hosted exclusively on Twitter. I’d like to change that! After all, that’s what the IndieWeb is all about. The first step was requesting and downloading all my content from the bird site. Once that was done I used the Twitter Archive Parser from Tim Hutton. From there is where MY story begins.

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Day 2: Fixing my Hugo BaseURL

by Aaron Crowder on in Projects

Yesterday I embarked on 100 Days of IndieWeb. Blog first, distribution second. Write first, edit later. I also wrote that I hoped to find/fix issues and streamline my posting process. Bryce Wray was kind enough to point out that I had an issue with relative links in my RSS feed. I was able to fix the issue by setting the BaseURL config value in my config.toml. The issue I had to tackle wasn’t just setting the value, I had to set it based on environment.

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100 Days of IndieWeb: Day 1

by Aaron Crowder on in Projects

I know, I know… I’m late. But Tantek’s post about a simpler approach to IndieWeb in his own 100 days series has inspired me to embark on my own journey. Consistently writing in my blog for 100 days straight won’t be easy but I think it will be worth it. I think it will spark a creative drive in me that has been lacking of late. As with any “100 days” project there will be some days where the effort is epic, and some days where it’s lackluster at best.

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On Having Covid

by Aaron Crowder on in Life

I’ve been sick the past week or so. At first I was really hopeful that it wasn’t Covid. Even though my wife and kids had already tested positive. I really really hoped that now, at the tail end of this thing, I could feel like I had escaped. That I’d made it to the other side unscathed. But that was not meant to be. I tested positive one week ago today.

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IndieWeb Proof-of-Concept

by Aaron Crowder on in Projects

The past few days I’ve been working on a proof-of-concept for this blog. It’s part of the roadmap I included in the post about this sites new theme. I already took care of basic styling (and code block styles) by using Simple.css. I also marked up all the posts on this site as an article (h-entry). That means sending / receiving webmentions and adding micropub support is up next. But in order to do those things I needed to figure out how.

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Simple.css: Classless Styles

by Aaron Crowder on in Site Updates

In my last post I mentioned that I wanted to keep this site simple. That I wanted to build on a solid foundation. I didn’t want to muck with that foundation to make my site look “pretty”. I shared the un-styled version of this site on my socials when @Duffy mentioned Simple.css. I fell in love with the idea of it right away. A classless css framework that applies styling to semantic markup?

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New Theme: Back to Basics

by Aaron Crowder on in Site Updates

Things look a little — ahem — different around here, don’t they? I think if you look carefully you’ll notice a few things have changed 😅 I recently decided that I wanted to change up my personal site and build from a solid foundation. There wasn’t anything wrong with my old theme. Far from it! It worked really well. I just wanted to have something that was purpose built for what I wanted.

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Trying out FrontMatter

by Aaron Crowder on in Site Updates

I recently found a really cool VSCode extension called FrontMatter. It allows you to manage your static site with a simple, intuitive interface, all within VSCode. This is the first post I’m writing with it. It sort of feels like a halfway point between managing plain text / markdown files and having a full-blown CMS. For my use, I don’t need something like WordPress… Markdown files and Hugo is plenty. But having a nice interface to see a list of posts, media, etc.

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Hugo Makefile

by Aaron Crowder on in personal projects

In doing research on themes for this blog, I stumbled across one called Neofeed that had a really interesting Makefile. I was really intrigued by the idea of being able to run a command to start a new post or run the hugo dev server. However, my needs where a bit different from the author of Neofeed. I modified their Makefile to suit, and I’m excited to write this post about the result!

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(The Long Road) Back to Hugo

by Aaron Crowder on in Site Updates hugo

Once upon a time there was a full-stack software developer who could NOT stop redoing his personal Website. I think this might be the 50th or 60th time I’ve done it in the last 10ish years that I’ve owned this domain. I have used all sorts of content management systems (even wrote a couple of my own) and static site generators. WordPress, OctoberCMS, Pelican, Hugo, etc. But I keep coming back to Hugo.

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